Your tweets, turned into mountain ranges

If you like seeing tweets transformed into topographical maps of San Francisco, New York and Istanbul, you’re in luck. Twitter has built a new tool that lets users view tweet volume in those cities as topographical maps, with peaks representing the highest volume and valleys the lowest volume. You know, like a topographical map.

The work is actually an extenstion of an earlier Twitter project — a heatmap of all the world’s geotagged tweets that the company released in May. The Mt. Everest of tweets in San Francisco appears to be in the SOMA (“south of Market”) area, just north of the Bay Bridge. Berkeley appears to be the K2.

San Francisco’s tweetography.

A view of San Francisco from the northwest.

I’m not certain what the utility of this particular tool is outside of the visual interest, but the bigger-picture ramifications are pretty clear. A company or institution with the right people — or the right software — could learn a lot about where certain brands, attitudes or topics are popular. At least among the geotagging crowd.